by Holly Lisle
"Dearest Vodi," he said, and bowed. At odds with his appearance, his voice held the echoes of a Stradivarius played by a genius. Nothing timid or bland about it. "You are a grace note to the universe."
She returned his bow and said, "Qawar, I apologize for my display of temper."
"No apology necessary. Little swan, you hold a weight on your shoulders great men could not hope to bear, and I would not chastise you for at times resenting your burden." He bowed again. "I have come to help you."
"How?" she asked.
That toothy smile again. "Perhaps you could recall the Hunter from wherever she has gone, that I might offer my services just once?" It was not a question, though—simply an order couched in politeness.
Molly had taken a lot of orders in the Air Force. Here, though, she held the higher rank. She could feel it in her gut, and in the fact that he had come to her. "I'm afraid that isn't going to be possible."
Both Seolar and the old god gave her wary looks.
"Why wouldn't it be possible?" Seolar asked. "You worked all day yesterday on gates and viewing. Surely you can just find her and tell her to come home."
"She isn't anywhere that we might be able to reach her."
"Find a way," Qawar said. "Her arrival finally triggered conditions which I have been watching for on a dozen worlds and for, ahhh, ten thousand years at least."
"She's gone where we can't follow," Molly said. "With luck, she'll make it back."
"Where is she?" Seolar asked. "We need her."
Molly said, "From where I was standing, it felt like she walked into the River of Death…and is on her way to the afterlife."
Two adult males could not truly create pandemonium—that would take a full mob or one child. But Seolar and Qawar gave it their best shot. Molly crossed her arms over her chest and listened to them shouting—at her, at each other, at thin air. She got the gist of what they both seemed to agree on, which was that she had been irresponsible in not stopping Lauren, and that those who crossed the abyss never returned, and that now the plan that would have saved the worldchain was wrecked, and whole worlds and peoples would continue to die horribly. And it would all be Molly's fault.
"She's going after her son," Molly said as soon as she found a patch of quiet in between their shouts.
If they had been angry before, now they were simply flummoxed.
"Going after Jake?" Seolar asked. "He…died?"
"No. Jake walked into the River of Death to go find his father. He wanted to bring his daddy home."
Qawar asked, "How old is this son of hers? How powerful? If he could bring the flow of the river of souls to him—"
"He's only three," Molly said. "He's just a very little boy who loves his daddy and wants to have him back."
Qawar looked sick. "And the Hunter chased after this three-year-old boy into Death?"
"She's doing what she needs to do. When she's done it, she'll find a way back."
"No she won't," the old god said. "She's lost forever. I might as well go back whence I came."
Molly said, "She figured out how to get there. My money is on her to figure out how to get back."
The River of Death, and Beyond
Lauren had found Hell—but she seemed to be the only one who noticed. The dead surrounded her, so thick she couldn't turn, couldn't move, almost couldn't breathe. She hung there, drowning in the dead, and though she could see them and feel them pressed against her, each soul seemed totally self-absorbed, oblivious to place and time and movement. They raced through darkness en masse, carrying Lauren along in their current, with the tunnel of dark fire that Lauren had summoned to enter the throng long gone. The darkness was not absolute, though; she could see the souls around her in the shifting grayness that streaked past at nightmare speed.
Her child, somewhere up ahead, traveled in the same mass of crowding spirits. He would be so scared. He would hate being crowded; he would be frightened by the screaming and the weeping and the manic antics of some of the dead. And he was so little, surely they must be pressing in on him even tighter than they were on her.
Jake would not understand this place. These people. Some of them wept. Some laughed. Some seemed terrified. Some stared backward, reaching and clawing toward whatever it was they had been ripped away from. But all of them save her traveled oblivious to the rest.
"You're dead!" she screamed at one shrieking woman who seemed to be trapped perpetually in the last instant of some horrible accident. "It's over! Nothing can hurt you!" But the screaming went on, and on, and on.
She tried to shove the man who laughed. She wanted to hurt him. But her hands went through him, and he didn't so much as twitch when she tried to make him stop. He had an evil laugh. He'd done something bad—something terrible—and he seemed to think he'd gotten away with it.
The worst was the young mother who kept sobbing, "My baby, my baby, my baby. Where is my baby?"
Yes. And where is mine?
Lauren's eyes filled with tears that she couldn't blink away. Gone, she thought. They're gone to someplace where we aren't. We can't find them, we can't help them, we can't get back to them. And I can't even put my arm around you and cry with you.
Hell. There was a Hell and she was in it. And so—somewhere—was Jake.
The spirits weren't all human—but her mind said, These are people like me. And they were going someplace, and when they reached their destination, surely someone would set things right. Would punish the man with the evil laugh, would comfort the mother whose baby was missing, and soothe the woman who had died so badly. Would point Lauren toward Jake, then toward Brian and Molly.
There had to be people in charge to set things right, didn't there?
The hellride stretched interminably, to the point where Lauren would have clawed her way free of the mob to find another way to get to Jake. But this hell had no footholds, no handholds, no ceilings or floors—just the dead packed like sardines on top of her, to either side, in back and in front of her, beneath her feet. An ever-shifting, writhing, inescapable cacophony that had neither beginning nor end—and the thought entered her mind and then would not leave; what if this was it? What if this was the afterlife, and there were no people who set things right? What if the afterlife was this river, and when Brian moved beyond the place between the worlds, this was where he came? How could Jake ever find him…here?
How could she ever find Jake?
Panic rose from her gut, set her heart racing, clawed at the back of her throat until she wanted only to scream, and to keep screaming until someone saw that she did not belong with the dead and plucked her free of them.
Then the sounds of screaming, sobbing, laughing, madness began to die away; one by one the faces around her calmed, and one by one each soul turned to face forward and looked upward. And looks of recognition crossed their faces, and little by little peace descended.
The darkness faded a little, into a more uniform gray, and Lauren had a feeling that she was near to arriving. But she could see nothing. She had no clue what the dead around her saw, no idea why they found peace, or if not peace, at least stillness.
Some of the pressure let off—space appeared between her and her fellow travelers. She could move her arms, turn and look around. All she could see were more of the dead, and they still paid no attention to her, though now almost all of them wore beatific expressions. Then one beside her blinked out of existence. And then another. Suddenly all of them were vanishing, popping away with soft little flares of light.
And still Lauren moved forward, at least in what felt like a forward direction, but the herd of dead around her thinned at an alarming rate, so that she could see bits and pieces of the place where she moved. And it made no sense.
Forward—relentlessly so, with fewer and fewer of the dead around her and the universe turned a flat, lifeless gray. This was the Afterlife? No clouds, no pearly gates, no sense of place. When she tried very hard, she could make out the lines where a sort of floor raced past be
neath her feet, but with nothing to give it scale, she couldn't begin to guess whether she floated inches above it, or miles.
She watched the dead all around her growing brighter, then blinking out. And then she discovered that she was alone, and still racing…somewhere. With a thought, she turned to look behind her. In the distance she could see the souls pouring into this place, growing brighter, blinking out. But finally she traveled so far that she could no longer see them.
And still she could find no detail to give the place either meaning or shape. Nothing but the gray floor lay beneath her, nothing but the gray sky arced above her, and still nothing to relieve the monotony. She tried to turn around to go back the way she'd come, but though she could turn without difficulty, she discovered that without any sort of visual reference she had no idea which way was back. She also discovered that she'd stopped moving—or at least that if she was still moving, she could no longer tell.
She hung in the middle of the void, all alone, and could not think of a single thing to do. Had Jake come this far? Had he found some way to Brian? Or was he, too, lost on this endless plain? She had to find him. She had no idea where to start.
In the moments between when she'd first discovered that Jake had taken off to rescue his daddy from death and the moment when she stepped into Death's river and discovered it to be nothing that would yield to her, Lauren had entertained a brief, shining hope—that she would burst into Heaven, rescue her child, then play Orpheus to Brian's Eurydice—that she would melt the hearts of any who stood between her and Brian with the story of their love and loss, and that she would win over whoever was in charge into letting her steal him away from Death. That her eloquence and her passion would win back Molly's soul as well. That this nightmare would have not just a happy ending, but a magnificent one.
That she would end up lost and alone in a place that was the most literal "middle of nowhere" that she'd ever seen had not even crossed her mind.
"JAKE!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. The sound muffled to nothing, as if she'd shouted through a mouth stuffed with feathers. Shouting wouldn't work.
Would she just hang there forever? She wouldn't accept that. Jake needed her. They were in the afterlife, but they weren't dead—so obviously whatever system existed had not been set up to accommodate the living. The souls of the dead had all gone places—things had started making sense to them, and they had found some sort of peace, and when they reached what looked to her like acceptance, they had vanished. She did not believe they ceased to exist. That would render everything that had happened meaningless. They were souls; souls were energy; energy did not cease to exist. That violated everything Lauren knew about physics—though what she knew wasn't a lot.
So, the souls had gone where they belonged. And because she and Jake did not belong anywhere in this place, they had ended up at the end of the…what? The sorting line?
She needed to have her feet on the ground, she thought. She needed to feel something solid underneath her, to get some sense of reality in the midst of this horror. And thinking that, she realized that she was floating downward—and as soon as she realized that, her feet settled gently on solid ground.
She took a deep breath, feeling a little better. Just knowing that she wasn't going to float forever in nothingness helped. What she really needed, though, was some direction. Some sort of signpost that could tell her which way was forward, which back, and which direction would take her to Jake.
She turned—slowly—looking for anything she could use as a reference point. A spot on the horizon, a signpost, a tree…
A tree would be great, she thought. Something to offer a bit of beauty in this dismal horror of a place. A big, strong, live oak, its gnarled, twisting branches spreading out a hundred feet in every direction, its leaves dark green and glossy, its massive shape a half sphere flattened at the top. Crowning a grassy knoll, adorned with a tire swing that would be a magnet for a scared little boy, with sunlight sparkling off the leaves, it would…
It did. Off in the distance, as far away as she'd imagined it, sat the very live oak she'd been spinning in her mind, and though she could not see any sun, sunlight nonetheless shimmered off the leaves. Beautiful—and the little patch of grass beneath and around it, and the tire swing hanging still and ready—all of it, beautiful.
Go to the tree, Jake. Wherever you are, go to the tree.
Lauren started to walk toward it, but stopped. Maybe Jake was too far away to see it. Or maybe the tree existed only for her imagination. She wanted to cry—she wanted to roll up in a ball and scream at the universe. But that wouldn't help Jake. She had to stay strong. She had to keep moving. She had no guarantee that Jake could find the tree, or that he would go to it even if he could see it. But if she could make a tree, she could make something considerably more useful.
Roads, she thought. With signs.
And she decided that the signs would be useful signs. TO JAKE . TO BRIAN . TO MOLLY. HOME .
She closed her eyes, visualized the signs, and made them as real in her mind as she could. JAKE—white letters on a green background, arrow pointing in the appropriate direction, a smooth black tarmac path leading across all this featureless grayness to the place where she needed to be. Another just like it that would take her to Brian and Molly. And then a sign pointing to the direction where she and Jake and Brian and Molly could all go home.
Lauren opened her eyes and was heartened to see the tarmac sprawling out in front of her, a fine, thin, arrow-straight ribbon running to her right. One road, a single direction, and she was at its very beginning. And directly in front of her, a sign. And the sign had its little arrow, and was green and white. But it did not say JAKE. Or BRIAN. Or MOLLY. Or even HOME. It said, ADMINISTRATION.
"Shit," Lauren whispered.
The road seemed infinite, with not a curve or bend in sight. In fact, it vanished to a point at a distance so far away that she could only guess at horizon and sky.
The road led past the tree.
She walked to the tree, and there she found another sign, planted in the grass. The sign said, "PLEASE DON'T REARRANGE THE TERRAIN."
Lauren frowned. Administration did not like the tree. Administration did not want her leaving signposts for her little boy—and didn't seem to care if she found him. Well, fuck Administration.
But as she watched, the tree slipped into the ground, turning gray and blobby before it did. And then it was gone. The grass vanished. The sign vanished. Lauren glared at the ground, at the grayness, and turned to look behind her, to see what had become of the green sign with the arrow.
The road ended right at her heels.
"Oh, Jake…this isn't good," she whispered.
The road still stretched ahead of her, though, pointing toward dread eternity, bisecting all infinity into two equally dreadful halves. She was not going to walk that whole distance. She closed her eyes and re-created her little yellow CRX in her mind, and willed it to appear in front of her. She opened her eyes. Another sign. WALKING WON'T KILL YOU. AND YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING.
Lauren screamed, "I want my kid back, you monster!"
And the gray nothing swallowed her scream the way it had swallowed the tree. She got no response. With tears leaking from her eyes and her throat aching and clogged, she started walking.
After a while, she decided that the nothing was changing at an insufficiently fast rate, and she started to run. The horizon remained the same, the ribbon of road the same, the gray ground and gray sky remained the same.
I could keep doing this forever and never get anywhere, she thought.
She stopped, panicked and desperate and out of ideas about what to do next. She sat down on the road, pressed her face into her knees, and just sat there for a moment. She was challenging Heaven, and she knew that—but all she wanted was her people back, and it seemed to her that if she'd found her way here, she had earned the right to claim them and go home. And yet it seemed that…that Administration, to use the bureaucrati
c name the bastard had chosen for himself, didn't think she had earned anything.
"You're brave," a voice said in her ear. "But you haven't earned anything."
She jumped, and looked around. Nothing. The voice had been kind enough. Not mocking. Certainly understanding, compassionate. But it was not a voice with good news.
She had not come all this way for bad news. She was going to find Jake—and then Brian, because Jake had risked his own life to get his daddy back, and they both loved Brian and needed him. And then Molly. She got up and started walking again.
"I'm not going to let you tell me I can't have them!" she screamed. She clenched her fists, glowered at the vast nothingness before her, and roared, "I WILL GET MY SON BACK! I WILL GET THEM ALL BACK!"
